It’s been a while since I reviewed a McFarlane Toys Halo 5: Guardians figure, and since I’m all hyped up for the video game to be released in two days, I figured now was a good time to get back in the habit! I was ultimately let-down by the Agent Locke figure I reviewed in the summer, but that didn’t stop me from buying one of my favorite members of Blue Team! The Halo 5 Spartan Fred figure is available online now for about 12 bucks shipped–is he worth your dollars?

The Right:

In just a few days, Halo video game purists will meet the de facto Spartan second-in-command that die-hard novel fans have known for years: Spartan Frederic-104 AKA Fred.

It was reading the Halo novels by Eric Nylund that made me really fall in love with the franchise, and I especially loved the middle book in Nylund’s trilogy, “First Strike”. Although Fred and Kelly appeared in the animated story “The Package”, they’ll finally get their video game due this week in Halo 5: Guardians!

And to celebrate, McFarlane Toys is giving us the third-ever figure of the Master Chief’s second-in-command. There was previously a 2″ Halo Mega Bloks Fred figure and an animated-style “The Package” Fred released, but this will be the first-ever video game-based action figure of Frederic.

And let me just say that from a visual perspective, this blows away every Fred-104 that’s come before it. This figure looks amazing, and is aesthetically one of my favorite Halo toys ever. The prototype and official photos that McFarlane Toys posted online of this action figure simply do not do justice to the high-quality look of the final product.

The combination of metallic slate blue armor gold visor and highlights looks killer together, and might be the very best color combination I’ve ever seen on a Halo McFarlane Toys figure.

The blue paint really brings out the texture of the armor, and all of the areas with gold or red paint apps on them really pop. Even the paint wash is perfect, bringing a depth to the sculpt while never being overbearing. And unlike the McFarlane Agent Locke figure that I gave a thumbs-down to in August, I feel like McFarlane actually managed to match the colors perfectly on-model for Fred and include all of the character’s crucial details.

I absolutely do not “gush” about the visual appeal of Halo figures in this manner unusually, but I am just super-impressed with how cool Fred looks. McFarlane Toys will have a hard time topping this figure.

The Wrong:

Fred suffers from the same mortal weakness as the Spartan Locke figure I reviewed a few months back: garbage articulation from the waist down.

The Spartan Fred McFarlane Toys figure’s upper-body articulation is acceptable. He’s got a ball-jointed head, ball-hinge shoulders, elbows and wrists, and even a ball-jointed upper torso. The range of motion on each upper body joint isn’t the best-ever or anything, but it is solid. He won’t exactly be reaching over into any extreme double-armed gun-slinging poses, but the upper-body flexibility is “good enough”.

Where the figure falls apart, however (sometimes literally), is the lower-body articulation. Fred has ball hips, ball-hinge knees and ball-hinge ankles with swivel on the front. On paper, this articulation scheme sounds swell. In execution, not so much.

The hip joints on Fred are absolutely awful. The hips can only be moved around a minimal amount, and if you try to position them even slightly more, the whole leg pops off. This happened to me at least a dozen times just while trying to pose Frederic for photos.

If the knee joints worked really well, we could probably use those to compensate for the limited mobility of the hips. But nope! The knees can only be rotated about 45 degrees, which basically dooms Fred to having a small fraction of interesting poses possible instead of the infinite amount a figure with better lower-body articulation would.

In addition, it’s really depressing that Fred gets the same rifle and pistol as every other figure in McFarlane Halo 5 Series 1. Remember the good old days when McFarlane produced virtually every weapon in the video games? Yeah–those were the days.

Overall: While the McFarlane Fred Halo 5 figure falls victim to the same articulation pitfalls as Spartan Locke did, Spartan Fred is superior in accuracy, the detailing on the armor and the paint deco. This is a Halo action figure that just looks great, and though he’s not the most fun toy around to pose, I can’t get enough of looking at and appreciating how terrific he looks. If you’re a fan of Spartan Blue Team (and who isn’t?), you need this figure. Recommended.

GRADE: B+